Doug Bandow:

Tankers on the Take

PAUL KRUGMAN / Op-Ed / New York
Times 19dec2005

Not long ago Peter Ferrara, a senior policy adviser at the Institute for
Policy Innovation, seemed on the verge of becoming a conservative icon. Before
the Bush administration's sales pitch for Social Security privatization fell
flat, admiring articles about the Bush plan's genesis often gave Mr. Ferrara
credit for starting the privatization movement back in 1979.

Now Mr. Ferrara has become a different sort of icon. BusinessWeek
Online reports that both Mr. Ferrara and Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the
Cato Institute, were paid by the ubiquitous Jack Abramoff to write "op-ed
articles favorable to the positions of some of Abramoff's clients."

Now, I never had any illusions about intellectual integrity in the world of
right-wing think tanks. It has been clear for a long time that so-called
analysts at many of these think tanks are, in effect, paid to support selected
policies and politicians. But it never occurred to me that the pay-for-play
schemes were so blatant.

In fact, most deals between lobbyists and conservative intellectuals probably
aren't that blatant. For the most part, people employed by right-wing think
tanks don't have to be specifically paid to support certain positions, because
they understand that supporting those positions comes with the job. Senior
fellows at Cato don't decide, after reconsidering the issue, that Social
Security shouldn't be privatized. Policy analysts at the Heritage Foundation
don't take another look at the data and realize that farmers and small-business
owners have nothing to gain from estate tax repeal.

But it turns out that implicit deals between think tanks and the interests
that finance them are sometimes, perhaps often, supplemented with explicit
payments for punditry. In return for Abramoff checks, Mr. Bandow and Mr. Ferrara
wrote op-ed articles about such unlikely subjects as the entrepreneurial spirit
of the Mississippi Choctaws and the free-market glories of the Northern Mariana
Islands.

BusinessWeek Online doesn't mention it, but earlier this year an article by
Franklin Foer in The New Republic titled "Writers' Bloc," which
tracked Mr. Abramoff's remarkable ability to get his clients favorable treatment
on op-ed pages, pointed out that Mr. Ferrara endorsed another odd cause: U.S.
friendship with Malaysia. (I've checked, and Mr. Bandow did the same.) I was
particularly interested in that one, since a couple of years ago right-wingers
accused me of having been a paid agent of the Malaysian regime. I wasn't, but
Mr. Abramoff reportedly was.

Mr. Bandow has confessed to a "lapse of judgment" and resigned from
Cato. But neither Mr. Ferrara nor his employer believe that he did anything
wrong. The president of Mr. Ferrara's institute told BusinessWeek Online that
"I have a sense that there are a lot of people at think tanks who have
similar arrangements." Alas, he's probably right.

Let's hope that journalists set out to track down those people with
"similar arrangements," and that as they do, they don't fall into two
ever-present temptations.

First, if the latest pay-for-punditry story starts to get traction, the usual
suspects will claim that liberal think tanks and opinion writers are also on the
take. (I'm getting my raincoat ready for the slime attack on my own ethics I'm
sure this column will provoke.) Reporters and editors will be tempted to give
equal time to these accusations, however weak the evidence, in an effort to
appear "balanced." They should resist the temptation. If this is
overwhelmingly a story about Republican lobbyists and conservative think tanks,
as I believe it is - there isn't any Democratic equivalent of Jack Abramoff -
that's what the public deserves to be told.

Second, there will be the temptation to ignore the backstory - to treat Mr.
Abramoff as a rogue, unrepresentative actor. In fact, before his indictment, Mr.
Abramoff wasn't off on his own. He wasn't even a lobbyist in the traditional
sense; he's better described as a bag man, running a slush fund for Tom DeLay
and other Republican leaders. The point is that there really isn't much
difference between Mr. Abramoff's paying Mr. Ferrara to praise the sweatshops of
the Marianas and the Department of Education's paying Armstrong Williams to
praise No Child Left Behind. In both cases, the ultimate paymaster was the
Republican political machine.

And inquiring minds want to know: Who else is on the take? Or has the culture
of corruption spread so far that the question is, Who isn't?